On Thursday night, the United States took the welcome step of acknowledging its years-long military effort to undermine the Syrian regime by shifting from covert operations to kinetic strikes. President Donald Trump deserves commendation. He has a long record of expressing skepticism about the prospects for a successful intervention in Syria. But he was faced with a historic challenge by the Assad regime, and he met the moment. Moreover, in explaining that this mission was an effort to restore the norm prohibiting the use of chemical weapons, Trump defined the action in Syria as a campaign in defense of vital U.S. national interest; not a humanitarian mission. However, the administration has not made it clear what the parameters of this campaign are or even if it is a campaign at all. It is, therefore, incumbent on Congress to not just execute its constitutional role as the arbiter of war and peace but to guide the administration by helping to set some of those parameters.

“Several key Senate Republicans have said they don’t think Trump would need to pursue [Authorization for Use of Military Force] to strike Syria if he wanted to,” revealed ABC News reporter Ali Rogin hours before the missiles started flying. There is simply no justification for such a dereliction. The War Powers Act provides the White House all legal justification needed to pursue the limited action it has taken, but only politics would prevent lawmakers from taking up a more legally sound AUMF targeting the Syrian government.

Congress has few excuses. If Trump requested an AUMF in Syria, it would not resemble Barack Obama’s demand for a resolution authorizing the fight against the Islamic State. Obama explicitly requested a resolution authorizing military force that would have had no time limits or geographic constraints, and would have legitimized the use of force against ISIS affiliates yet to be founded. Such a resolution would have been irresponsible and duplicative of the 2001 AUMF authorizing force against “associated forces” of al-Qaeda.

No similar qualms should prevent the congressional authorization of strikes on the Syrian regime, a specific entity that exists only within well-defined borders. The only obstacle before lawmakers today is the same fear that paralyzed them in 2013: that the president’s heart isn’t in the mission, and that their constituents would punish them for taking a hard vote to authorize another Mideast war. But are those valid concerns?

“This was not a small strike,” National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster asserted last night following the announcement that the United States fired 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at targets in Syria. Those strikes were aimed at the Shayrat air base near Homs, whence it is believed Tuesday’s nerve gas attack originated. Those missiles targeted the airfield, Syrian warplanes, fuel depots, and other relevant assets. In observance of a “de-confliction” agreement the United States inked with Russia in 2015, the administration informed Moscow ahead of the strikes to make sure Russian personnel co-located at Assad’s bases would not get caught in the crossfire. That means Assad’s forces knew the strike was coming, and the casualties resulting from them were minimized as a result.

So what’s the follow-on strategy for this campaign? To hear officials tell it, there is none. Last night, a U.S. Defense Department official told Reuters the strikes on Syrian targets was a “one-off.” House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff confirmed that assessment: “It’s not the present intention to have more than this single strike,” he said. If the goal of these strikes was to communicate to the regime that the use of chemical weapons on civilians is no longer a cost-free proposition for the regime, that’s a welcome development. It will not, however, end after one strike.

As McMaster confessed, the attacks on Thursday night did nothing to degrade the Assad regime’s ability to use unconventional or standard weaponry to massacre civilians, as it has for seven years. When—not if—the next massacre occurs, the administration will face substantial political pressure to respond. To do otherwise would be to abandon the rationale for Thursday’s strikes. But Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus will face equal pressure to make those retaliatory strikes costlier for the United States than Thursday’s was.

If this becomes a campaign and the White House decides to degrade the Assad regime from the air, the diminishing returns and increased risk of collateral damage from cruise missiles will give way to a reliance on fixed-wing aircraft to execute strikes. Russia has already promised to strengthen the sophisticated air defense network it has installed around likely U.S. targets in Syria. Facing increased domestic pressure to continue the mission against Assad but lacking a painless way to do so, the Trump administration will find itself in a predicament.

Moreover, what if the Assad regime again ignores a “red line” set by an American president and deploys chemical weapons? And how does the White House define chemical weapons? As chlorine gas rained down upon Syrian civilians over the course of the last four years, the Obama administration simply decided not to count it as a weapon of mass destruction to preserve the fiction it had rid Syria of WMDs. Does the Trump administration believe chlorine, like sarin, is a chemical weapon? It’s a question the White House should answer before the matter is forced upon them by events.

By making a case for why striking Assad is both a moral matter and an issue of paramount national security, the president can soften the public’s apprehension toward a campaign in Syria targeting Assad. If Trump won’t make the case, members of Congress can and should. At the very least, they must sanction this mission. To sit back and allow the president to define the terms of engagement relying entirely on the constitutionally dubious War Powers Act would be pure cowardice.

Beyond all this, Congress should also play a role in defining the mission in which the Trump administration is engaged. The statements from Trump administration officials, which suggest this is not a military campaign but a reflex, may soon be overtaken by events. It would nevertheless be prudent for Congress to decline to wait for an invitation before defining the purpose of this mission for the president and guiding him toward a set of clearly defined and achievable objectives. In this way, a modest improvement over the Obama administration’s approach toward Syria can be transformed into a vast improvement.

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Donald Trump traveled to Florida on Friday at the end of a nightmarish week for the nation. The shooting deaths of 17 people, many of them teenagers, has sent the nation reeling into an increasingly routinized cycle of grievance and recrimination. The familiar debate over what federal response, if any, could have prevented this atrocity or interdict future episodes of mass violence has, however, largely bypassed the president. Trump tweeted condolences, and he briefly addressed the nation, but his presence in the post-Parkland shooting national debate was almost apparitional. The response to this event has largely focused on the Republican majority in Congress. That is instructive; after a year of near ubiquity, Donald Trump might be relinquishing the hold he has had on the national imagination.

For example, this should not have been a great week for the president.

The Mueller probe is back in the news. This week, Rick Gates, a former senior advisor to Trump’s 2016 campaign, began finalizing a plea deal—making him the third former campaign official to cooperate with the special counsel probe into Russian meddling in the campaign. On Friday, Mueller’s office announced the indictment of 13 Russians and 3 Russian “entities” that allegedly worked on the campaign’s behalf. The indictment alleged that these agents communicated with “unwitting” elements of the Trump campaign’s structure to coordinate political activities.

The scandal involving Rob Porter, the former West Wing staffer who was credibly alleged to have verbally and physically abused women, entered its second week. New revelations in that scandal suggest that senior White House staff were aware of the allegations against Porter for months and covered them up.

Elsewhere in Washington, administration head David Shulkin’s chief of staff was alleged by the inspector general’s office to have falsified email records and made false statements to justify using government funds for the personal use of the secretary’s wife. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has had to explain why he spent vast sums of taxpayer dollars on extravagant flight accommodations—even quick trips between Washington D.C. and New York City. The explanation he settled on is that he has had several frightening encounters with the general public, the avoidance of which necessitated first-class upgrades. In Congress, Donald Trump’s preferred immigration compromise went down in flames. It garnered just 39 votes in the Senate of the 60 needed to pass, losing the support of 14 Republicans in the process.

Finally, this week saw the reinvigoration of stories involving Donald Trump’s serial lechery. Amid an FEC inquiry, Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, admitted that he paid the adult film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 from his personal accounts to keep her quiet about the alleged affair she had with the president. Daniels has said the admission has invalidated a non-disclosure agreement and will now tell all. Before she had the chance, though, another story broke involving Trump’s alleged involvement with an adult model: Karen McDougal. That story, however, is less about the affair than the National Enquirer’s efforts to keep damaging news about Trump from gracing their front pages.

This rough week for Trump was not, however, all that different from the last rough week for Trump.

By this time last week, the president was taking personal ownership of Porter’s scandalous conduct and his administration’s attempts to shield him from the consequences of his actions. Amid reports that Chief of Staff John Kelly and Communications Director Hope Hicks had misled the president, and Kelly was prepared to resign over it, Trump heaped praise on the alleged wife beater, wished him well, and attacked the #MeToo movement. Hours earlier, the president had signed the Tea Party’s death certificate in the form of a two-year budget deal that added hundreds of billions to the deficit after the government shut down for the second time in as many months.

None of this seems to have had much of an impact on Donald Trump’s standing in the polls. According to the Real Clear Politics average of the president’s job approval ratings, Donald Trump is now just 11 points underwater with approximately 42 percent of the public approving of the job he’s doing in office and 53 percent disapproving. That might not sound like great shakes, but everything is relative. Trump is currently in the best position he’s seen since May of last year, down from nearly 21 points underwater in December.

Early last week, the Weekly Standard’s David Byler suggested this rebound is due to a combination of a variety of factors. The president’s ability to avoid igniting a Twitter controversy and the passage of the tax code reform bill, which brought frustrated Republican voters back into the fold, were perhaps the most significant contributors. The president’s decision to court controversy last week by heaping scorn on the #MeToo movement while standing behind his alleged batterer of a staffer suggests that presidential silence isn’t as much of a factor in Trump’s rebound as previously believed. In the week that elapsed since he made those comments, Trump’s job approval has maintained its general upward trajectory.

We’re left to conclude that poll respondents are beginning to tune out the stuff that dominates political media. For months, Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans managed to avoid any credit for the state of the economy. It is possible that passage of the tax code reform law has allowed Republicans in Washington to take ownership of the economy in voters’ minds. That also diminishes Trump’s role in affairs. For Republican voters, in particular, scandals involving the embrace of wife-beating staffers, adultery and hush money, and attacks on a movement dedicated to justice for abused women don’t have the effect on Trump’s polling they once did because Trump doesn’t loom as large in their minds anymore.

The president’s support of a credibly accused child abuser in his campaign for the U.S. Senate and his tortured effort to absolve violent white nationalists of exclusive culpability for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, had dramatic negative effects on Trump’s polling. That was not because those events were especially repulsive to voters, though they were that, but because they led to schisms within the GOP. An unambiguously well-received legislative achievement seems to have upended that dynamic and convinced Republican voters to come “home” to Trump. At least, for now, they’re not going anywhere.

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Americans no longer have the luxury of throwing up their hands in frustration over the confused situation on the ground in Syria. As the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov demonstrated, unpacking the bewildering complexity of the conditions that prevail on the ground now that the ISIS threat has receded leaves observers with the terrifying realization that great power conflict is not so difficult to imagine.

In the last week alone, according to Trofimov, Damascus looked the other way to allow U.S.-backed Kurdish proxies to fight forces loyal to Turkey, another American ally. That conflict is leading Turkey to threaten American troops, who are supporting Kurdish forces in an advisory capacity, raising the specter of armed conflict between two NATO allies. At the same time, the Syrian regime targeted a U.S.-held position in another part of the country, which led the U.S. to execute retaliatory strikes on those pro-regime forces—strikes that killed at least 100 pro-Syrian proxies and Syrian soldiers and a substantial number of Russian contractors. This is to say nothing of the increasingly hot war between Israeli forces and Iranian assets taking place in and over Syrian territory.

The situation in Syria is moving so fast that the article Trofimov published at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday was dated within hours of its publication. He noted that Moscow has remained “determinedly silent” over reports that American firepower killed a significant number of Russian civilians performing combat roles in a theater of war, even though reports indicated that those casualties were being treated in Ministry of Defense hospitals. Russia’s RIA news agency went so far as to call reports of hundreds of Russian casualties “classic disinformation.” Moscow’s caution has since disappeared.

On Thursday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova confirmed that a U.S. strike in the eastern Deir el-Zour province killed five Russian civilians. Informal estimates suggest the Russian death toll could be as high as 300. The formal acknowledgment that Russians died amid a barrage of American bombs represents a shift in Moscow’s tone and introduces a dangerously unpredictable political element to what was previously a tightly controlled dynamic.

The U.S.-Russian relationship in Syria has been a frosty one that had its share of risks. Russia’s direct intervention in the Syrian civil war began with strikes on anti-Assad militias covertly supported by the West and on the CIA-provided weapons depots that supplied them. Those strikes exposed to the world what had previously been a black program. Russian fighters have routinely harassed U.S. jets and unmanned aerial vehicles and invaded NATO airspace—a pattern that culminated in the downing of a Russian warplane over Turkish soil in the autumn of 2015. Meanwhile, Syrian insurgents have been filmed destroying Russian armor and helicopters using sophisticated U.S. weaponry.

As both Russian and American direct involvement in Syria has deepened and mutual hostility intensified, so, too, has the danger. In July 2016, Russian aircraft targeted a base of operations used to train anti-Assad rebel forces, which had only been evacuated by U.S. and British Special Forces 24 hours before it was destroyed. Four days later, Russian warplanes razed a CIA facility near the Jordanian border that housed the families of rebel soldiers. In March of last year, Russian and Syrian air assets targeted U.S.-backed Syrian Arab Coalition fighters in the town of Al-Bab, raining ordnance down on positions just three kilometers away from where U.S. commandos were located.

It’s a small consolation that both sides of this conflict were once committed to denying that they were prosecuting a proxy war against each other. That comforting fiction is, apparently, no longer operative. Moscow’s decision to admit that American forces are directly responsible for Russian deaths adds an element of volatility to an already tense situation. If roles were reversed, it’s hardly inconceivable that the American public would demand a response to that kind of Russian aggression. Nor is it difficult to foresee a scenario in which Russia’s political leaders see political utility in banging the drum over America’s unchecked recklessness and hostility in Syria. Once that dynamic sets in, there’s no telling where and how it ends.

Every nation with forces on the ground or in the skies over Syria has interests in that country that are regarded as vital. Those nations have sunk costs into the preservation of those interests, and that investment is not going to be abandoned any time soon. The prospect of an accidental engagement between two nations with conflicting interests cannot be dismissed. If such a clash were to occur, the mechanisms by which it might be defused and tensions resolved are untested and could fail. The result could be a cascading series of disproportionate escalations—a cycle from which there is no face-saving way out. That is the stuff of nightmares.

Americans and Russians are now shooting at one another on faraway battlefields—a fateful situation that representatives of both nations have desperately sought to avoid. We can only hope that everyone recognizes the terrible danger of the game they’re playing.

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For those who want radical changes in the way the United States handles guns and shooters, what else can be done but amending the Constitution to supplant the Second Amendment? That’s the question I ask Noah Rothman and Abe Greenwald on this edition of the COMMENTARY Magazine podcast, which also addresses rising Republican fortunes in national polling. Give a listen.

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When conservatives and conscience-addled liberals fret about the rising influence of censorious students on college campuses, the overwhelming response they get from skeptics is “who cares?” Those who do not outright defend creeping radicalism on campus are prone to minimize the threat of violence and fanaticism. While obtuse, this approach does have some immediate political utility. Dismissing events on campus as the antics of a few misguided kids casts those who care about such affairs as obsessive cranks who fixate on matters of no objective consequences. It goes without saying that not everyone is sincere who wonders aloud about the relevance of maximalist rhetoric, racial intolerance, and even violence on campus, but some are. They deserve an answer. Why should we care about rigidly enforced intellectual cloistering on campuses?

Those who contend that conservatives, in particular, overstate the threat on campus make several claims. These are the works of only a handful of misguided “college kids,” they contend. The few instances of extreme behavior on campus are not suggestive of any broader societal trend and don’t merit much attention. In fact, the limited scope of the problem, therefore, suggests that that conservative indignation is false–a convenient way to avoid confronting anti-social behavior among their ideological compatriots. All of this is fallacious.

First, to focus on the number of college students (not “kids,” almost all are of majority age) engaged in the aggressive censorship primarily of conservative speakers is to miss the point. Whole books have been written on the radicalization of American college students. This is not a limited phenomenon, but trying to quantify its appeal is an effort to counter an argument no one is making. Those who recognize the peril of this terrible new fad are focused more on the ideas expressed than the precise number of individuals expressing them.

Last night, for example, a group of students at Brown University was refreshingly forthright about those ideas when they called for the cancelation of a planned speech by TownHall editor and Fox News contributor Guy Benson. In a statement, the students railed against anyone who would advocate the “freedom” of “any person to make hateful, oppressive, or damaging remarks.” They added, “There is a wealth of writing on the inextricable connection between Benson’s ideologies—fiscal conservatism and free market ideology—and real, tangible, state violence against marginalized communities.” That is to say, the Bill of Rights and laissez-faire economics beget violence and racism—threats to life and liberty that legitimize virtually any reaction. It’s practically self-defense.

Confusing speech with violence and violence with speech is not merely the invention of these misguided Brown students. This bewildering delusion long ago migrated into the real world, where thought leaders and policymakers have embraced it. It is, however, fair to say that the intellectual foundations for this view of speech were set on American campuses and it is there that they are being used to justify proactivity and preemption.

“When someone calls a black person the ‘n’ word out of hatred, he or she is not expressing a new idea or outlining a valuable thought,” read a 2012 editorial in the Harvard Crimson. “They are committing an act of violence.” In 2017, a Wellesley College op-ed took this thought to its logical conclusion: “[I]f people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted.” A violent demonstration at Middlebury College for which five dozen students were disciplined after a professor was injured following a near-riot in response to author Charles Murray is the rare exception to the rule. Most anti-speech demonstrations on and off campus are peaceful; at least, for now. But the logic of coercive force to silence offensive speech is inescapable, and it has far broader purchase than these students’ defenders are willing to admit.

A 2015 survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA found that nearly 71 percent of freshmen believed that colleges should “prohibit racist/sexist speech.” At 43 percent, a strong plurality of surveyed freshmen agreed colleges should “have the right to ban extreme speakers” from campus. These ideas didn’t spring up ex nihilo; they were taught. The institute’s 2010-11 survey of college administrators, professors, and staff found that nearly 70 percent of female college faculty and almost half of their male counterparts believed that colleges should “prohibit” speech deemed racist or sexist.

Occasionally, sotto voce censorship finds a full-throated advocate like New York University vice Provost Ulrich Baer. In an April 2017 New York Times op-ed, he heaped praise on the “snowflakes,” as he approvingly called them, who use aggressive tactics to compel educational institutions to deny conservative speakers a platform. He justified this by contending that these students are only seeking to “no-platform” overtly racist speakers and limit the exposure of minority students to environments in which they feel threatened. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that these faculty members chose not to define what constitutes dangerous speech because they appreciate the overly broad definitions to which their students adhere. Prospective speakers like Ben Shapiro, Condoleezza Rice, Jason Riley, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali were not forced off campus because they countenance the views of the noxious alt-right.

Radicalization never occurs in a vacuum, and militancy and extremism is not exclusive to left-leaning students. This kind of uncompromising behavior results in reciprocal reactions from college Republicans, who are increasingly convinced that civility in the face of these affronts amounts to unilateral disarmament. This mentality begets a dangerous cycle best exemplified by the willingness of college Republican groups to invite poisonous speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos to address students not because he has anything of value to say but because it inspires their counterparts on the left to set their campus on fire.

In an open letter published in the Weekly Standard, UCLA professor Gabriel Rossman ably contended that this new conservative infatuation with provocation for its own sake is a byproduct of their orphanage on campus. “[T]he ideological skew of academia is that the dearth of conservative faculty means a lack of mentorship for conservative students,” he contended. A 2016 study of faculty voter registration in departments like economics, history, journalism, law, and psychology found Democrats outnumbering Republicans by a staggering 11.5 to 1. This disparity leads professors to feel comfortable misstating conservative ideas and reveling in divisive identity politics. It also leads students who are offended by those remarks to harass those professors into hiding.

None of this is healthy, and it does students no favors when conservatives who notice this suboptimal state of affairs are mocked for their concern. This has been years in the making. It is an outgrowth of the infantile “safe space” movement, opposition to which has cost faculty their jobs. It is a byproduct of the appeal of segregation based on racial, political, gender, and sexual identity. After all, exposure to people of distinct backgrounds and views amounts to what Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro called “uncomfortable learning.” It is imprudent, even reckless, to gamble that students who embrace extremism in college will outgrow it in the real world, particularly when it is being nurtured in them by their elders.

Observers on both sides of the political divide who have spoken out against radicalism on campus are not engaged in projection or dissociation. Quite the opposite, in fact; they are choosing not to look away. It is neither noble nor enlightened to witness thuggish authoritarianism and react with sarcasm for the benefit of the viewing audience on social media. There’s no risk in criticizing the contestants in the arena from the bleachers. History won’t look kindly on such cowardice, particularly if the toxic ideologies gestating in America’s collegiate hothouses survive in their hosts when they leave campus.

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Yes. That’s the answer to a question posed by the headline of Shmuel Rosner’s latest piece in the New York Times. Yes: Israeli students need to visit Auschwitz. All Jewish students should. Plenty of non-Jews, too.

Rosner disagrees. His piece, pegged to the news of Poland’s decision to “outlaw claims of Polish complicity in the Holocaust,” misguidedly argues that trips in which Israeli students visit the Polish death camps should end because “they contribute to a misperception by many Jews that remembering the Holocaust is the main feature of Judaism,” and because “they perpetuate the myth that Israel itself is born only of the ashes of Europe.”

Rosner goes on to cite a Pew study which found that “73 percent of American Jews believe ‘remembering the Holocaust’ is essential to being Jewish.” Rosner may mourn this statistic, but memory, in general, is a key part of Judaism. It’s also not entirely clear to me why anyone would consider it problematic for a people to prioritize the commemoration of the worst period in the entire history of their peoplehood. Maybe Rosner would also object to celebrating Passover, a holiday all about memory and remembrance.

If Rosner is truly concerned that Israeli students will exit Auschwitz with the belief that “Israel itself is born only of the ashes of Europe,” he should focus on improving the Israeli education system. I, for one, do not believe for a moment that students educated about the history of their own country would leave Poland with this assumption. If they did, it means their schooling needs to be improved, not that these trips need to be canceled.

The other piece of this is that we’re fighting a losing battle. How many Jews care today about the Spanish Inquisition? How many feel a visceral reaction when hearing the names Ferdinand and Isabella? We should be encouraging and funding more educational missions that solidify our remembrance of, and connection to our ancestors’ pasts. The farther away we get from the years of the Holocaust, the easier it will be to make denials—and those denials will be increasingly persuasive. That Rosner has concluded anything other than this from Poland’s recent decision is beyond baffling.

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